Random Thoughts

• Oil As Money (10/17/2004)
• Where's the Outrage? (4/05/2004)
• Mis-leading Causes of Death (12/11/2003)
• Natural Selection (10/20/2003)
• Sacks of Woof (9/5/2003)
• Have you ever seen your brain? (8/22/2002)
• Are Anti-Telemarketing Laws a Bad Idea? (8/17/2002)
• Commoditization of Computing Tasks (8/14/2002)
• What's Money to Geeks? (6/24/2002)
• Physical vs. Electronic Books (6/23/2002)
• Cell Phone As Your Only Phone? (6/18/2002)
• Tourist Attractions in 100 Years? (5/15/2002)
• Houses Are Too Attached to the Land (5/15/2002)
• Fast Gas Pump Invention (3/5/2002)
• Am I Getting Stupid or What? What! (3/3/2002)
• The Value of Human Muscle Power (11/18/2001)
• Loose Change (7/10/2001)
• Afterlife Implications of Reviving Frozen Babies (3/7/2001)
• Not Enough Roofs (7/28/2000)
• Alphanumeric Calculators (3/19/2000)
• Explanation of Sidereal Days (11/20/1998)
• Dear FreeAmp product designers: (11/17/98)
• I guess it's okay to copy your own CDs for private use. (11/11/98)
• Olympus D320L Review (11/2/1998)
• Zoom in Digital Cameras (10/98)
• Engineering vs. Marketing (10/98)

Oil As Money

We should use oil as money, just like gold used to be used as money (but handling the oil transactions electronically of course).

Any commodity-backed currency would prevent the politicians from creating funny money out of thin air like they do now. A commodity-backed currency would protect us from inflation and would cut down on the number of wars and other stupid government programs that easy fiat/fake money allows.

Sure, 'oil as money' may give too much power to oil companies, foreigners, etc. It would probably increase drilling too, but think about the conservation aspect: Drive your car or heat your home and you're literally burning money. No one wants to burn money. Think how much we'd cut back!

Where's the Outrage?

When a healthy young person dies that's considered a tragedy, and so it should be. Everybody's sad and people demand that whatever the cause of this death was must be stopped. However, when a sickly old person dies that's typically accepted as normal. When a healthy young person gradually becomes a sickly old person that's accepted too. Now, consider those parts carefully. The combined effect is that a healthy young person dies. Why isn't this considered a tragedy?

Mis-leading Causes of Death (12/11/2003)

So how much of a "leading cause of death" is it still? The other day I happened upon this website, The Disaster Center, and noticed some interesting subterfuge. The site purports to have a set of lists of the top ten causes of death (in 1996) for various age ranges. Take a look at the 25-44 age group. "Motor Vehicle Accidents" is positioned at the top of the list, but look closely -- HIV, cancer and heart disease each account for more deaths. What's going on? Whoever put this together obviously rigged it to make Motor Vehicle deaths come out on top. How? It stands on its own line but gets its ranking on the basis of the category it's in. Hmmm. To put things in their proper perspective I've recomputed everything using three broad categories: illness, accident, and intentional means (i.e. homicide and suicide):

The depth of an age range (gray) indicates how many people of that age group died in 1996. The colors indicate what they died of. Not surprisingly the vast majority of deaths occur in the older age ranges and they are almost entirely caused by illness. What's surprising (to me, anyway) is that illness accounts for twice as many deaths as accidents in Americans under 45. The majority of deaths in all ranges except 15-24 are from illness, and even in that 'reckless' group only one-third of their deaths are from motor vehicle accidents. As it turns out the total number of motor vehicle deaths for Americans ages 1-44 is a few percentage points higher than the next leading causes, cancer and HIV (27,988 vs. 25,264 and 23,389 respectively), but that lead might go away if we distinguished between single car and multicar accidents, those that were due to poor road design vs. driver stupidity, etc. The takeaway is this: you probably have worse things to worry about than the risk of dying in a motor vehicle accident.

Natural Selection (10/20/2003)

Of course we'd never actually throw them out the window considering all the trouble it took to get them in the first place. It makes you wonder, though, from an evolutionary point of view, how the human race ever got past step one. I bet your typical caveman and cavewoman didn't carefully plan their families; they did what came naturally then the babies just showed up (and started crying). Fortunately caves don't have windows or the first generation of crying babies would have been flung out of them. End of story. Or, maybe this was natural selection in action -- a parenthood test. In primitive times, all human children who survived past infancy were guaranteed to have parents who didn't throw them out the window despite the incessant crying (and no legal barriers). Thus the valuable "love your children unconditionally" trait was selected for. Children whose parents had it lived to pass it on.

Birds evolved differently. Their babies DO get thrown out the window. The trait that's selected for is "know how to fly".

Sacks of Woof (9/5/2003)

Consider this: If you walked around town carrying a sack of sh*t squirting little piles here and there you'd probably be arrested, but if the sack barks and has fur it's somehow okay. What's up with that?

Have you ever seen your brain? (8/22/2002)

Brains are funny -- you know theoretically that you have one, but it's nice to be able to check.

Are Anti-Telemarketing Laws a Bad Idea? (8/17/2002)

>didn't realize being a Libertarian disqualified him from using our court system.

The problem isn't that he used the court system, it's the thing he was suing about:

"Eric Postpischil took a Londonderry telemarketer to small claims court, arguing that she had violated the federal and state law by calling him with an automated dialer that delivered a prerecorded message." -Associated Press

With this law, the government has taken it upon itself to decide who can and cannot call you. Since it's telemarketers they're restricting most people say "oh, good for us" but for libertarian-minded people the problem of telemarketers is small compared to the problem of a government that butts into every little aspect of life.

Not only that, the government solution doesn't even work. How many of you still get unwanted calls from telemarketers? When government steps in they invariably make compromises, e.g. "Telemarketers can't use prerecorded messages but can use live operators; they can't call businesses or us but can call residences; they can't call after 9:00pm but can call during the day; they can't call an individual who jumps through the right hoops but they can call you. We've got to balance the interests of everyone involved, you know!" The resulting solution is mediocre at best -- telemarketers still call you, and now they have the snotty attitude that the law *says* they can call you. Plus the government solution pre-empts the development of private solutions that may be better.

IMO the telemarketer problem is simply a problem with phone service in its current form. Standard phone service comes with no way for you to control who can ring your phone. That's a business and/or technological problem; it's not a "society" problem. In general, we libertarians believe that any problem that can be solved peacefully by the parties involved should be. If someone robs you then call the police, but if you're simply not happy with your phone service then complain to the phone company... or switch companies. Maybe with enough pressure they'd kick out the telemarketers -- whoops, I wouldn't be surprised if the government actually made it illegal for them to do that (universal access or something). Okay, maybe they'd charge more for lines making over 100 calls per day. Maybe they'd offer you better filtering options. You can get limited after-market caller ID filters now, but how about something that bumps strangers to voicemail but family & friends get through? How about personal 900 numbers whereby strangers have to pay you a buck for the privilege of ringing your phone? It's hard to say what *could* be available if the government hadn't pushed its way in early on with their "approved" solution. They kind of have a monopoly on everything they touch.

There are deeper freedom issues: Each time government assumes responsibility for something it pushes the idea that it's the source of all authority and regular people are sheep. It's a mindset that justifies taking more than 40% of your income in various forms of taxes. And don't forget this one -- Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, right? If they can restrict telemarketers now what keeps them from restricting you in the future?

Questions that came back are along the lines of 'but why should we have to pay for privacy?'. My answer to that won't be as elaborate; it's along the lines of 'burglary is not just annoying, it's illegal -- but you still pay to put locks on your doors. Most telemarketing isn't even illegal. Why should you get that protection for free?'.

Commoditization of Computing Tasks (8/14/2002)

The question is, are we missing a big idea like this in the world of large-scale computing?

In the world of large-scale computing operations we already value some standardization of course. When possible it's nice to have all our servers come from the same vendor and run the same operating system. If a project requires multiple servers, if possible we'll choose a design whereby they're all the same and more can be added later to handle more load. What we don't have is a concept of a 'computational unit' to standardize our infrastructure around.

It may be there are too many variables. The shipping industry chose geometry and not weight to standardize on, and that was okay. We've got cpu, memory, storage and bandwidth. Perhaps memory could be dropped (and lumped in with storage) but that still leaves a lot of more variability than in the shipping industry. Early detractors there probably thought bananas and televisions were too far apart, until someone invented a refrigerated container.

Or, it may be that computation is like a liquid, like pumping and transporting oil and containers are stupid. Of course, oil has its own standards. ...not done yet... more to come...

What's Money to Geeks? (6/24/2002)

"The only point of money for technonerds is that a certain amount of it is needed to support their techno-habits."
--http://intuitor.com/moviephysics/mpmain.html, discrediting the character portrayals of the greedy submarine techies in the opening sequence of Titanic

Physical vs. Electronic Books (6/23/2002)

The tough question is what about books. It is easier to read a book in physical form than on a computer screen -- you can carry it around, read it in bed, read a few pages in a spare couple minutes without waiting for it to boot up first, and the resolution is better. Lightweight laptops and e-books are better than desktops but paper still wins (for the time being).

Once you've read any given book, though, what do you do with it? You stick it on a shelf. There it takes up space. Your chances of picking it up again and reading it cover to cover are much lower now that you've already read it. Unlike a new book, you're more likely to want to search for a particular thing in a book you've already read (e.g. a quotation or some other specific information).

All this points to this strategy on books: when you read a book the first time it should be on paper; after you've read it you should want an electronic copy.

That said, it's all up to the publishers as to whether (when) we can actually buy electronic copies of books, and how an initial physical copy might be priced into this. The only thing I can suggest to an individual reading this in 2002 is if you're inclined to scan in a book you own that you've already read and are contemplating separating the pages from the binding to make the scanning easier but are reluctant to because that would destroy your physical copy, go for it.

Cell Phone As Your Only Phone?

Like one responder I also have no landline at home. My cell phone is my phone.

I had a landline and a cell phone then moved and never bothered getting a new landline. Cellular service is good where I live. I have unlimited local calling during nights and weekends with my "near-basic" cell plan. I get 15 minutes per day which doesn't sound like much but turns out to be twice what I need. If my battery runs down when I'm home I can just plug in the charger and keep talking. Sometimes I lose calls when I'm driving or my battery goes dead when I'm away for the weekend, but having a landline back home wouldn't help in those situations anyway. The only reason to get a landline would be to get unlimited local calling during weekdays between 7am and 9pm. Most of that time I'm asleep, at work, or out; the money would be much better spent on a more generous cell plan.

Actually my wife has a landline at home but I don't use it. When I first moved in with her we tried sharing it (thinking I needed a "real" phone instead of just a cell phone). That never worked well what with messages, conflicts and people not knowing where to call me, so soon I only gave out my cell number. I reserved the right to use her phone for weekday day & evening calls but soon realized I wasn't doing that nearly enough for it to matter. As an experiment I tried using just my cell phone for everything and it's worked out fine for over a year now.

I realize going cell-only wouldn't work for everyone for a variety of reasons. However, I think we'll be seeing a lot more cell-only people in the next couple years. Once it becomes obvious that this is feasible, every cell phone user who moves will have to consciously justify getting a landline in their new home. I believe more and more will opt not to.

-Bill

P.S. I agree sometimes cell phones can be annoying in public. My phone doesn't ring, it vibrates. IMO ringing is a bad idea copied over from landlines (where it's necessary). I minimize talking while driving except on open highways, and in general I'm pretty liberal with letting calls go to voicemail when I'm with real people.

P.P.S. Darn, new information: It seems you need an active landline in order to get DSL (we're thinking of switching from cable to DSL). What a waste! That's like requiring automobile buyers to have a horse and buggy. They just don't get it.

Tourist Attractions in 100 Years? (5/15/2002)

My wife and I just had a vacation in England. We visited many historical sites -- castles, fortresses, palaces -- places that in the past were very serious and mattered a great deal, where great leaders once lived or directed the course of nations (or were beheaded), but that now aren't much more than mere curiousities for tourists.

The question, of course, is what noteworthy and/or important places in today's world will be reduced to mere tourist attractions in the future? Let's say 100 years from now, in the year 2102. Here are some I can think of:

• The Pentagon will become a war & armaments museum. We won't need the Pentagon because we'll have a world without war, right? Hahaha! No, we won't need it because the U.N. will take over the job.
  
  
• The Bill Gates high-tech house will be like Hearst Castle is now.
  
  
• An old space shuttle would make a great museum exhibit for the kids to play on, and the International Space Station could become a quaint historic orbiting hotel.
  
  
• People will visit the World Trade Center Memorial and try to visualize the tragic day their great-grandparents told them about, or that they sang songs about as kids in summer camp before realizing it was a true story (think Titanic or Great Chicago Fire). If they travel anywhere near Afghanistan they can see the cave where that old villian Osama bin Laden's skeleton was found, but they'll see it with the same detachment we'd have now towards Sitting Bull or General Lee (or even Lee Harvey Oswald).
  
  

Can you think of any more?

-Bill

Houses Are Too Attached to the Land (5-15-2002)

Now think about the life cycle of a house. It gets built on a particular piece of land. The land (i.e. its location) probably determines more about the value of the house than anything to do with the actual building. A house built on an expensive lot starts life as a new house, and so does a house built on a cheap lot. Fifty years later the cheap house is obsolete and somewhat worn out, yet so is the expensive one.

The problem is the permanence of houses. Find an easy way to pick up houses and move them around and we're all set. Then wealthy people can buy the latest new houses without having to move. Less wealthy people can buy houses on the used house market. Manufacturing efficiencies will bring prices down. It would be pointless to spend tens of thousands of dollars to pay manual workers to renovate your old house when for just a little more you could get a new one from the factory. Imagine this conversation: "We're getting a new house!" "Great, send us your new address when you move in." "What do you mean 'new address'? We're just getting a new house."

The ability to carry large houses by air would be good, but unfortunately I don't see that happening anytime soon. I don't know much about houseboats. Perhaps large houseboats would be practical. These could be towed into place by tugboats, completely bypassing the problem of delivering large structures to sites on land. Flying cars would make living on large ships at sea far more practical, but that's another story.

Fast Gas Pump Invention (3-5-2002)

What's the solution? There are two:

1) Having better sensors in the nozzle, faster means of shutting of the pump, and perhaps a flow-stopping mechanism up near the nozzle rather than just back at the pump would help somewhat but would probably be pretty expensive, or

2) Your car knows how much gas it already has and it knows how big its tank is. If it could tell the pump how much remaining capacity it has, the pump could deliver most of the gas much more quickly, unconstrained by the "spillover" risk, and just slow down for the last gallon or so (kind of like those videotape rewinders that slow down when they're almost done). The technical details are the easy part: either radio, optical or a non-sparking electrical connection would suffice to transmit the capacity figure, and the pump would operate the old-fashioned way if the car receiving the gas could not provide the required information. Furthermore the car could transmit the desired grade of gas which would be useful for pumps that dispense multiple grades out of a single nozzle. The hard part is the chicken & egg problem of getting car manufacturers and gas pump manufacturers to both do this.

Since I'm neither a car manufacturer nor a gas pump manufacturer I'm hereby licensing the use of this idea to anyone who wants it provided that if you communicate it to anyone else you acknowledge me as the source of the idea, and provided that I'm not legally prevented from making such an offer (e.g. such as if someone else already patented it and is just keeping quiet about it).

Am I Getting Stupid or What? What! (3/3/2002)

The other day an acquaintance sent me a link to an online IQ test. I took the test and it reported back my supposed IQ along with an offer to give me a 'full evaluation' of my results for $9.95. The IQ score it gave was a little lower than I expected, and this was the day after getting rejected by MIT, so I took them up on their offer in hopes of finding out why I seemed to be getting dumber so maybe I could do something about it.

I did something about it. Their analysis said I could have done better in Logic, so I reverse-engineered the test, experimenting with different answers for the logic questions until I found the one *they* got wrong, then wrote an email to the purveyor of the test asking them to fix it. I just heard back; they say they've refunded my money and are going to replace the question.

That felt good.

The Value of Human Muscle Power (11-18-2001)

Loose Change (7/10/2001)

Everyone knows pennies are pretty much worthless; maybe worse than worthless because they're annoying to deal with. They slow down transactions and collect like litter in your pockets. It bugs me to see someone accidentally drop a penny on the floor and then not pick it saying "it's only a penny; I don't need it". I don't care what they need; they're littering -- they should clean up after themselves and pick up the penny they dropped.

I once found a website listing the pros and cons of eliminating pennies from circulation. Their biggest reason for keeping pennies was the contribution to the economy of all the copper mines and factories needed to make the pennies! Anyone who tries to tell you that jobs for jobs' sake help the economy is either a liar or a complete idiot. Whatever economic 'benefit' there is from making a useless product could just as easily be achieved by paying the workers to stay home and do nothing, and that would be much better for the environment too.

In 1981 just before they started making pennies out of zinc my history teacher, Mr. Pennino, taught us about how bad money drives good money out of circulation and suggested that authentic copper pennies might be worth a lot in the years to come. Based on this tip I hoarded many jars and Coke bottles full of pennies, thinking someday these could be worth hundreds of dollars -- maybe even like a thousand, wow! Back in those days of $3.50 movies and $6.00 records a thousand dollars was a lot of money -- enough for a *really* good stereo system or maybe even one of those newfangled VCRs, which I would be able to afford thanks to strategically investing in copper. After 20 years and many moves I got tired of waiting, and I decided to dump my pennies in the easiest albeit least cost effective way possible. I took all the bottles and jars to the supermarket -- one of these megasupermarkets that sells every household item you could possibly want, plus some food too, and just happens to have an automatic 'cash in your loose change' machine by the entrance. It took half an hour to empty the jars, cut open the plastic bottles, unwrap the coin rolls, and shake all the stupid pennies down the little slot. In the end, after the 7.5% fee, I got a slip for about 80 bucks. I went into the store to visit the cashier and redeem the slip and there, looking not at all out of place in the middle of a grocery store aisle, was a stack of $80 VCRs. Hey, my plan worked after all.

Afterlife Implications of Reviving Frozen Babies (3/7/2001)

IMO the frozen baby story has deep religious implications. If there's an afterlife I would have assumed it would begin right around the time a person dies, but babies coming back to life several hours after they've died kind of changes things. Now it's several hours you have to wait; maybe in a few decades the time limit will be several days ("well, she started to decay already but we'll send in some nanobots to reconstruct all her vital organs then we'll start her up again"). There's a big difference between when a person is actually irrevocably dead based on the medical technology available.

So, when does a dead person go to heaven? Do heaven workers have to keep tabs on what we're up to enough to know what's humanly possible and therefore know how long to wait before deciding a person is really actually dead?

You would think that medical technology that mere humans invent shouldn't put a big cramp in how heaven does it's admissions job. In order for that to be true either 1) heaven workers aren't bound by earthly time -- they don't have to wait and see, they can simply look up in the database when the person's final heartbeat or brainwave occurs and pick them up at that time, or 2) people remain dead until the end of time and then they go to heaven (or hell or wherever). Possibly, they wait until the end of time before they go to heaven but once there they can come back to now and watch us if they want.

...Or, maybe she just didn't exist for 2 hours while her heart (& brain presumably) were stopped, and that's that.

Not Enough Roofs (7/28/2000)

In an ideal suburbia you'd get into your car via your attached garage, you'd drive to wherever it is you're going, and exit your car into a covered parking area or garage. Garages don't have to be heated, they don't have be fancy, they just have to exist. If you wanted to walk around in the fresh air you could, but you wouldn't have to (kind of like exercise is compared to manual labor you need to do to survive). Covering all the sidewalks in a city would be tougher. Still, a lot more could be done than is done now.

I could understand if roofs were expensive but many times there's just no excuse for not having one. One nearby office building built in the 1980s has a huge parking garage right next to the building but you still have to walk 50 feet in the rain and snow to get inside. What?!? The money they'd save on shovelling and lawsuits for people who slip on the ice would surely have covered a little roof to connect the garage to the building.

Alphanumeric Calculators (3/19/2000)

Suppose I want to find out what is three times the cosine of thirty seven. This isn't rocket science, but most calculators make you jump through hoops to get the right answer. I want to type in 3 * cos 37. I want to get the answer when I press = and no sooner. I want the right answer. Naturally, the calculator should show "3 * cos 37" in the display as I'm typing it in. For extra credit I should be able to easily go back and change it to 2.5 * cos 37 without starting from scratch.

Most calculators give the wrong answer, and they don't give any visual feedback to let you know they're giving the wrong answer. On the calculator that comes with Windows [NT 4.0] for example, try clicking on the following:

3
*
cos
37
=



Here's what happens:

3 -- a '3' appears
* -- nothing happens
cos -- The cosine of 3 appears. Not only does the word 'cosine' or 'cos' fail to appear, but I absolutely did not want to calculate the cosine of 3. Why in the world is it trying to give me an answer when I haven't finished entering the problem yet? Simple -- because 40 years ago the processing and memory available for a desktop calculator could only handle one operation at a time and we are stuck with that legacy.
37 -- 37 appears on the display, apparently obliterating everything that came before it.
= -- 111 appears! Is this a joke? Somehow it remembered the 3 and the * but forgot the cos and it gave me the answer to 3 * 37. There's no way of visually confirming what it decided to calculate; if I had given it a more complicated problem I might not have realized it gave me the wrong answer.

People who design most calculators use a screwed up model left over from 30 or 40 years ago back when memory and processing power were extremely limited, and 7-segment displays were hot stuff. Such limitations still might make sense for a cheap 4-banger calculator that falls out of the cereal box, but certainly a calculator program running on a PC should be able to do much better. I really don't know what the problem is. The display is there, the power for parsing stuff is there, what's the problem?!?

In 1980 I bought a Sharp EL-5100 calculator for $55 that has a 24 character display and does all of this correctly. I still use it daily -- nothing better has come along for doing basic algebra.

-Bill

Explanation of Sidereal Days (11/20/1998)

Anyway, that would be 365.24/366.24, or a 0.9972695th or so of 24 hours. The difference between this and your book's well-rounded 0.997 figure accounts for the extra 2.6 hours per year you calculated. Leap years are just something they made up for people who can't deal with fractions.

Dear FreeAmp product designers: (11/17/98)

Here's a UI feature request for you: I want buttons I can ACTUALLY READ! Ever since these silly triangles, squares and lines started appearing on physical devices it's bugged me. Why not use the words "Play", "Pause", "Stop" or whatever. I'm 34 years old, I learned English a long time ago, and I wish people would quit trying to replace it with hieroglyphics every chance they get. In the world of atoms it may make sense sometimes -- a manufacturer can save a lot of money making one language-blind device rather than many language-specific devices, but that doesn't apply to you guys. For one thing, you've already got language-specific text in your program. Also, it's a lot easier to account for language differences programmatically than it is for let's say Sony to stamp out a different set of plastic buttons. If you keep the hieroglyphics and make labeled buttons an optional preference that would still satisfy me. That way you don't have to alienate all the backward-thinking users who expect a software device to look like its old physical counterpart.

Also, styling it to look like a picture of a physical CD player is cute (I hear that even in the early days of automobiles some were made that had reins instead of a steering wheel), but it's limiting. There's one gaping hole in the "CD player" metaphor, and since it concerns one of the biggest advantages of MP3 files over CDs it's a pity you're ignoring it. A typical CD player can only play one CD "album" at a time without cumbersomely reloading. An MP3 player should excel at playing anything you've ever loaded on your computer. Looking at your screenshot I can't for the life of me figure out how to select an album to play. How about a nice self-explanatory file box? I think what I really want is a database like MusicMatch's jukebox, but more album-centric.

Bill Hees

I guess it's okay to copy your own CDs for private use. (11/11/98)

Olympus D320L Review (11/2/1998)

With this camera you should buy a set of rechargeable NiMH batteries, and buy a bigger memory card. You will want to take a lot of pictures, and you have to get these details taken care of before you can freely take pictures.

I have two sets of NiMH batteries, so I can use one while the other is charging. They have no "memory effect", so you could get by with one set and just keep them topped off. I have an 8mb memory card which holds around 40 high-res pictures. 4mb might suffice, but the 2mb card that comes with the camera only holds 10 high-res pictures -- you will be tempted to shoot in low-res mode all the time, which defeats the purpose of having a good camera.

More expensive cameras offer higher resolution and optical zoom (which maximizes the resolution you've got), but this camera produces images that are perfectly fine for regular snapshots.

Zoom in Digital Cameras (10/98)

Engineering vs. Marketing (10/98)

It went a big step towards confirming what I was starting to believe since working for Lycos -- that the world does not revolve around engineering. This may come as a shock to you. I remember a while back Roger saying "When you think about it, the world revolves around engineering [or something like that]. Engineers design products, workers build what the engineers design, salesmen sell what the engineers design, marketing people market the stuff that the engineers design", etc.

I'm not saying the world revolves around marketing in the popular sense of "let's send out a mass mailing or two, and give out yoyos with our company name on them at the next big concert". However, a lot of the world revolves around business decisions which, when it comes down to it, are part of marketing. "What market are we going to compete it, search engines or web portals?" "How can we position our product best, or what product should we try to develop quickly so as to fill an opening before someone else gets it?" There is a strong force in this direction, whereas there's only a weak force going the other way -- engineers telling what can and can't be done, coming up with new ideas, etc.

Of course, inventors get to do all the fun stuff.